6.20.07: Berlin: Stasi HQ (Part I)

CS has a retrospective at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, a large old-style museum here. It’s the last stop on the grand tour this show had been on. I join her after she’s been here for a few days. Berlin is lovely in the summer and there’s lots to see. We bike to various museums and the various galleries, mostly in the Mitte district. The food is great — not as exclusively pork and potato oriented as it used to be (though some of the traditional food is delicious.) The city is extremely bike-friendly; there are plentiful lock-up racks, and on many (but not all) of the major streets there are dedicated bike lanes cleverly integrated into the sidewalks, so there is no danger of a car veering into the lane or someone parking or unloading in it.

There are also little stoplights for the bikers, even turn signals! Needless to say, most cyclists stop for the lights, and most of them ride with the flow of traffic — they get really angry if you ride the wrong way in the bike lanes. Pedestrians don’t wander into the bike lanes either!

I’d heard that there is a Stasi museum, so we looked it up and it’s almost out in the suburbs, in the former complex that was the Stasi HQ. It’s not listed in most of the museum guides — and Berlin has a lot of museums — so it required a little bit of research to locate. We biked out, appropriately enough, along the amazing Karl-Marx-Allee, a sort of Soviet-inspired version of the Champs Élysées or Ave 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires, or maybe Park Avenue — but even wider and grander. The vaguely Moscow-style apartment buildings outdo those in Moscow and rival those grand apartments in other cites, except these are more orderly and repetitive, echoing into the distance — to a utopian infinity, it appears at times. These are not ugly bland modernist projects. They have almost Northern Italian detailing, and though they’re frightening in their scale and surreal repetition they are far more appealing than U.S. housing projects or even a lot of Western modernist buildings where lack of décor was held up as a moral virtue. Here’s an infrared digital image.

On one side of the street the ground floors are former cinemas, hardware stores and medical supply stores; the other side has more outdoor cafés with tables in the shade of trees. The stores in general seem to have lagged behind the influx of luxury that got pumped into the center of the former East Berlin after the wall fell. Here is a window display in a medical supply shop that to me harkens back to an earlier time:

A thing of beauty. What KIND of thing, though? Not exactly the basic food groups as WE know them, but maybe that was the idea.

In an odd way, the hard times in some communist countries saw to it that some of the original architecture was left alone. There was little money for wholesale urban redevelopment as there was in many Western cites. So, in many cases, buildings that in the West would have been torn down and replaced by ugly offices or elevated highways were left standing and are now extremely desirable. (Except the former modernist mirrored Communist Party HQ on Alexanderplatz, which is being slowly dismantled.)

I passed through and worked in Berlin fairly often in the 80s. West Berlin was an artificially pumped up arty capitalist showcase, and East Berlin was full of incredible historical buildings, shabby apartments and no amenities. It really was gray and depressing — at least to a visitor. In the west young Germans could avoid the compulsory military service, rents were relatively cheap and parking laws were almost non-existent. Kreuzberg, the Lower East Side of West Berlin, was one of the most decadent low life places I’ve ever seen. Lots of black leather, heroin and late night punk clubs. A sort of government-sponsored bohemian world just out of reach, but visible over the wall, from the Easties. The rest of luxurious Western decadence the Easties could see on bootleg films and TV — plenty of food and fashions and cars — but they could probably smell firsthand the currywursts and kebabs that fueled the nightlife just over the wall. (I remember the East smelled like coal, as that was what heated the homes for many years. It reminded me of the way Glasgow smelled when I would visit my grandparents as a boy: coal smoke and black soot. I liked the smell.)

After the wall came down all that changed. There was no need to artificially entice people to live in the walled island city anymore. Now the decadence is of another sort and it has migrated to various neighborhoods in the former east. Now the it's Friedrichstrasse and the surrounding boulevards filled with luxury goods boutiques, designer labels and swanky hotels. There was a brief period when the historic buildings of Mitte were going for peanuts and many became squats and cheap artist housing (there are still incredible artist studios here) but that was a relatively short-lived time — now there are coffee shops and graffiti that are reminders of those post-wall days, but the fancy goods stores and developers are moving in fast.

Karl-Marx-Allee has yet to catch up to all this, though the buildings have been cleaned up and I hear the former apartments of Party members and Stasi higher-ups are lovely. So, it was a fitting prelude to the Stasi visit.